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DISCOVER

music of the

Classical Era

by

Stephen Johnson

Discover Classical Book 12-12-7:Classical Era Booklet 13/12/07 11:48



Published by Naxos Books, an imprint of Naxos Rights International Ltd

© Naxos Books 2007

www.naxosbooks.com

Printed and bound in China by Leo Paper Group

Design and layout: Hannah Davies, Fruition – Creative Concepts

Music compiled by Stephen Johnson

Editors: Harriet Smith and Ingalo Thomson

Map illustrator: Arthur Ka Wai Jenkins

Timeline: Hugh Griffith

All photographs © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library

Front cover score extract: Haydn’s Symphony No. 94, ‘The Surprise’

A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of Naxos Rights International Ltd.

ISBN: 978-1-84379-235-2

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page

Website 4

Music of the Classical Era, by Stephen Johnson 7

I. What Was the Classical Era? 8

II. Nature versus Reason 17

III. Sensitive Style 21

IV. New Means to New Ends 28V. The Emergence of the Orchestra 33

VI. Old and New: Conflict or Co-existence? 40

VII. Revolution in the Opera House 47

VIII. Mass Movements and Secret Societies 56

IX. Surprises and Subversion 68

X. Democracy Moves Centre Stage 80

XI. The First Romantics? 86XII. Prometheus Unbound 89

Sources of Featured Panels 100

A Timeline of the Classical Era 102

Composers of the Classical Era 116

Map 118

Glossary 119

About the Author 122

Index 123

Contents

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Website

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and hear over two hours of music, all referred to in the text.

To access the website you will need:

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Password: Surprise

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DISCOVER music of the CLASSICAL ERA




5

Website





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music of the

Classical Era

by

Stephen Johnson

7




I. What Was the Classical Era?

Broadly speaking, music historians are agreed about when the

Classical era occurred. It was that time of extraordinary

creativity, dominated by composers from the German-speaking

countries, which saw the creation of the masterpieces of Franz

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

(1756–1791), and the first mature works of Ludwig van

Beethoven (1770–1827). In other words, it’s a period that

stretches from the second half of the eighteenth century to

around the first decade of the nineteenth. This was a time of

unprecedented social and political upheaval, with the French

Revolution of 1789 as its climax and central turning-point. It

was also a time in which many of the features of the modern

world first became defined. While France was purging itself of its old order and establishing the Republic, Britain was

experiencing the beginnings of its own Industrial Revolution.

Both these phenomena were to have immense consequences

for the rest of the western world. So this was an age of epochal

transition – or what the much-quoted old Chinese curse calls

‘interesting times’.

It’s when you get to the question of what it is that

distinguishes the music of this so-called ‘Classical’ era that the

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The Death of Marat (stabbed in his bathby Charlotte Corday, Paris, 13 July 1793)

Painting, 1793, by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) © AKG Images / Erich Lessing

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What Was the Classical Era?




arguments start. In the visual arts, commentators tend to be

reassuringly clear about what ‘Classical’ means. One of themost important theorists of the Renaissance, Leon Battista

Alberti, defined Classical beauty in painting and architecture

as ‘the harmony and concord of all the parts achieved by

following well-founded rules and resulting in a unity such that

nothing could be added or taken away or altered except for

the worse’. As an ideal it has frequently been contrasted with

Romanticism – not least by the Romantics themselves. The

poet John Keats, for example, offers a hymn to ancient

Classical beauty in his Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819):

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time

The German Romantic composer Robert Schumann heard

these kind of qualities in Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 (1788),

which he praised for its ‘Grecian lightness and grace’. In

another of his writings he extended the image to Mozart’s

music as a whole:

Serenity, repose, grace, the characteristics of the antiqueworks of art, are those of Mozart’s school. The Greeks gave to

‘The Thunderer’ [Zeus] a radiant expression, and radiantly

does Mozart launch his lightnings.

Mozart’s first biographer, Franz Xaver Niemetschek, also

extolled him for his ‘Classical’ qualities: ‘The masterpieces of

the Romans and Greeks please more and more through

repeated reading, and… the same applies for both

connoisseur and amateur with regard to the hearing of

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“Melody is the very essence of music.When I think of a good melodist, I think of a fine

race-horse. A contrapuntist is only a post-horse.”

Mozart to Michael Kelly, Letter (1786)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

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Mozart’s music.’ However, one of the greatest of all Romantic

critics, E.T.A. Hoffmann (a man who loved Mozart so muchthat he changed one of his own forenames from Friedrich to

Amadeus), saw it very differently. For Hoffmann, Mozart and

Haydn were the first Romantics. What struck him above all

else about their music was not ‘harmony and concord’, but

the way it challenged ‘well-founded rules’, springing dramatic

surprises, giving a new freedom to the imagination and

allowing the expression of emotions with unprecedented

intensity and directness. In an essay written in 1814,

Hoffmann groups Haydn and Mozart with Beethoven,

contrasting them with what he felt to be their superficial and

often false contemporaries:

Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven developed a new art, whose

origins first appear in the middle of the eighteenth century.Thoughtlessness and lack of understanding husbanded the

acquired treasure badly, and in the end, counterfeiters tried to

give the impression of the real thing with their tinsel, but it

was not the fault of these masters in whom the spirit was so

nobly manifest.

Clearly Schumann and Hoffmann can’t both be right – or can

they? Following the tracks on the website that accompaniesthis book, listeners may well find they are pulled alternately in

both directions. There are times when one is very much aware

of an order, balance and elegance that the Romantics seemed

intent on destroying. In such moments we are reminded that

the eighteenth century was also the era of the intellectual

movement known as the ‘Enlightenment’, which emphasised

rationality, the primacy of scientific method. It was the period

in which educated men widely believed that the laws of a

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divinely ordered universe had been laid bare in the theories

of Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). There was no place in thisuniverse for mind-boggling concepts like quantum mechanics

or Einstein’s relativity: order and harmony reigned. This

serenely rational view of the universe is beautifully expressed

in the words of the hymn by the English essayist Joseph

Addison (1672–1719):

The spacious firmament on high,With all the blue ethereal sky,

And spangled heavens, a shining frame,

Their great Original proclaim.

The unwearied sun from day to day

Does his Creator’s power display,

And publishes to every land

The work of an almighty hand…

What though in solemn silence allMove round the dark terrestrial ball;

What though no real voice nor sound

Amid their radiant orbs be found;

In reason’s ear they all rejoice,

And utter forth a glorious voice,

For ever singing as they shine,

‘The hand that made us is divine’.

The eighteenth century was also a period in which the

writings, art and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome

were being rediscovered and re-evaluated. The ruins of

Pompeii and Herculaneum were excavated, sketched and

pondered on by many. This in turn exerted a formative

influence on the new art of the age. Many of the great houses

and gardens of the royalty and nobility are pervaded by this

sense of grand design, underlined with images and symbols

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drawn from Classical antiquity. And if one wanted to imagine

a kind of musical soundtrack to accompany a tour of one of these Arcadian palaces and their exquisitely landscaped

surroundings, it might well be the Serenade from the String

Quartet published as Haydn’s Op. 3 No. 5 (c. 1777) ,

but probably composed by a minor contemporary, Roman

Hoffstetter (1742–1815): in the late eighteenth century the

name ‘Haydn’ on a publication was a virtual cast-iron

guarantee of sales. This elegant, tastefully mannered aria for

muted violin with simple, regular pizzicato accompaniment is

untroubled from first to last. Nothing mars its gentle

continuity; sweet reason prevails.

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“Friends often flatter me that I have some genius,

but Mozart stands far above me.”

Franz Joseph Haydn

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)

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The German composer and critic Johann Mattheson,

writing in The Perfect Kapellmeister , offers advice to

budding Mozarts:

A composer must know how to express truly all the heart’s

inclinations by means merely of carefully chosen sounds

and their skilful combination without words, so that a

listener can completely grasp and clearly understand the

motive, sense, meaning and force, with all the phrases and

sentences pertaining thereto, as if it were a real speech.

Then it is a delight! Much more art and a stronger power of

imagination belong to this achievement without words than

with their help.

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II. Nature versus Reason

Let’s turn now to a piece of wholly authentic Haydn: the first

movement of the Symphony No. 45 in F sharp minor,

nicknamed the ‘Farewell’ Symphony . How Classical

– in Alberti’s sense of the word – is this? Listening to this

volatile, intensely dramatic music we may be tempted to side

with Hoffmann and identify the first stirrings of Romanticism.

Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony was written in 1772, at a time

when a new literary movement was emerging. This became

known as Sturm und Drang – usually translated as ‘Storm and

Stress’, though the German word Drang also has implications

of yearning. Sturm und Drang was the title of a play by

Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, written in 1776 – a turbulent,

passionate drama (one of the characters actually has the name‘Wild’), which emphasises emotional truth over and above

order and harmony.

Klinger and his fellows were strongly influenced by the

Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778),

who rejected rationalism in favour of nature, feeling and

emotion, and idealised what he called the ‘noble savage’ –

the type of man whose personality had not been trammelled

and emasculated by what the western world was pleased to

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Nature versus Reason




call civilisation. It was not through ‘reason’s ear’ that God

spoke to Rousseau. For this thinker every question of importance to mankind – ethics, politics, even religion –

could be answered by the voice of nature. In his widely

read Emile ou Traité d’Éducation (‘Emile, or Treatise on

Education’, 1762) Rousseau puts his feelings about religion

into the mouth of an idealised and highly unconventional

country priest. ‘I do not deduce the rules,’ he tells us, ‘from

the principles of a high philosophy, but I find them in the

depths of my heart, written by Nature in ineffaceable

characters.’ ‘Thanks be to Heaven,’ he concludes, ‘we are

thus freed from all this terrifying apparatus of philosophy;

we can be men without being learned; dispensed from

wasting our life in the study of morals, we have at less cost

a more assured guide in this immense labyrinth of human

opinions.’

Intriguingly – though also somewhat confusingly – some

of Rousseau’s followers labelled this new anti-rational, pro-

natural thinking as ‘Classicism’. They argued that it was

through imitation of the ancients – the Greeks and Romans

– that one could rediscover primal simplicity and natural

truth: hence the frequent use of Classical imagery in theworks of the great French painter Jacques-Louis David

(1748–1825), who like many of his fellow revolutionary

sympathisers revered Rousseau. This notion was developed

by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder,

who found his ideal of ‘naturally’ expressed human

emotion in folk poetry and music, and in the recently

rediscovered plays of Shakespeare, which were soon to be

embraced across Europe as an antidote to what was seen as

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Johann Gottfried von Herder muses on the potent but

indefinable effect of music:

Music arouses a series of intimate feelings, true but not

clear, not even perceptual, only most obscure. You, youngman, were in its dark auditorium; it lamented, sighed

stormed, exulted; you felt all that, you vibrated with every

string. But about what did it – and you with it – lament,

sigh, exult, storm? Not a shadow of anything perceptible.

Everything stirred only in the darkest abyss of your soul,

like a living wind that agitates the depths of the ocean.

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Nature versus Reason




the over-stylised, overly rational Classicism of the French

dramatists Corneille and Racine.Haydn’s middle-period symphonies, of which No. 45 is

one of the greatest and most original, are often presented as

embodiments of the spirit of Rousseau-inspired Sturm und

Drang in music. Haydn himself might have raised an eyebrow

at the thought of his name being associated with any

fashionable artistic movement; in 1761 he had entered the

employment of Prince Paul Esterházy at Eisenstadt in Hungary,

where, as he put it, ‘I was cut off from the world. There was no

one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become

original.’ Undoubtedly there is some truth in that; and yet,

listening to the first movement of the ‘Farewell’ Symphony it is

hard to resist the feeling that the spirit of Sturm und Drang had

penetrated even as far as insular Eisenstadt. The downward-

plunging first theme, each note incisively accented, could

hardly be further from the lilting restraint of the Serenade from

Op. 3 No. 5. Then there are the sudden loud–soft contrasts

(the Serenade has no indications of dynamics at all), the

equally sudden changes in texture, the nervous string tremolos

and the dramatic use of silence – something Haydn was

particularly good at (for example at 3’29” and 4’16”). Thenineteenth-century Romantics may have developed and

intensified such devices, but this is still clearly a language of

emotional extremes.

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III. Sensitive Style

Every age has its share of ‘isms’. Alongside Sturm und Drang

another aesthetic tag came to prominence in the German-

speaking world: Empfindsamkeit (‘feeling’, ‘sensitivity’) or,

particularly in music, empfindsame Stil (‘sensitive style’). To

some extent Empfindsamkeit corresponds to the British cult of

‘sensibility’, examined with acutely critical wit by Jane Austen

in her novel Sense and Sensibility . Its followers devotedthemselves to the cultivation of feeling in writing and

performance, and in music its outstanding exponent was Carl

Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), son of the famous J.S.

Bach. In 1773 the British music historian Charles Burney

visited C.P.E. Bach at his home in Hamburg, where the

composer’s improvisation at the clavichord made a lasting

impression:

After dinner, which was elegantly served, and chearfully [sic]

eaten, I prevailed upon him to sit down again to a clavichord,

and he played, with little intermission, till near eleven o’clock

at night. During this time, he grew so animated and

possessed, that he not only played, but looked like one

inspired. His eyes were fixed, his under lip fell, and drops of

effervesence [sic] distilled from his countenance. He said, if he were to be set to work frequently, in this manner, he

should grow young again.

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Sensitive Style




“It appears to me that it is the specialprovince of music to move the heart.”

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788)

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The idea of making expression of human feelings the highest

goal of music was not new. The sixteenth-century Florentineintellectuals, Giovanni de’ Bardi, Vincenzo Galilei and Jacopo

Peri, who unwittingly created the genre of opera, were partly

motivated by descriptions they’d read of the music of ancient

Greece – and particularly of its almost supernatural emotional

impact on its hearers. What was unprecedented about the

music of C.P.E. Bach and his ‘sensitive’ contemporaries was

that their efforts to achieve this new intensity of expression

centred not on vocal but on instrumental music. The forms in

which C.P.E. Bach achieved some of his finest and most

characteristic results were the solo keyboard sonata, the

concerto and a new medium: the orchestral symphony. In

some ways the symphony was the direct descendent of the

Baroque orchestral suite: a sequence of contrasted movements

adding up to a whole that is felt to be greater than the sum of

its parts. But where the individual movements of J.S. Bach’s

orchestral suites were marked by continuity of mood and

musical texture, those of a symphony were fluid and

changeable, with marked dramatic and expressive contrasts.

C.P.E. Bach’s engagement with the symphony did not

begin until the 1770s, when he was nearly sixty. The reasonfor this late start was not purely artistic. From 1740, Bach

spent twenty-eight years as harpsichordist at the court of the

Prussian king Frederick the Great, in Berlin. Frederick was a

fine and enthusiastic musician, but with time his tastes grew

increasingly conservative. It wasn’t until 1768, when C.P.E.

Bach took up the post of music director in Hamburg, that he

at last felt free to explore the new possibilities of his art. His

first six symphonies, known as the ‘Hamburg’ symphonies,

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Sensitive Style




were commissioned by an important, progressively minded

patron, Baron von Swieten. Before sending off the new worksto the Baron, Bach decided it would be a good idea to give

them a private run-through in front of a group of carefully

chosen friends and colleagues. Four decades later, in a

German musical newspaper, one of them recalled this

extraordinary evening:

In the house of Professor Büsch a large band of musicianswas assembled by Eberling to make a thorough study of those

symphonies before they were sent away. Reichardt led from

his violin to the relief of the anxious composer. One could

hear with enchantment the original, bold progressions and

the great variety and novelty in the forms and modulations,

even if they were not entirely appreciated. Seldom has a

musical composition of higher, bolder and more witty

character flowed from the soul of a genius.

All those qualities can be heard in the first two movements of

the Third ‘Hamburg’ Symphony . This music is

anything but predictable, and sudden, bold harmonic and

textural changes abound. In the first movement a lively wit

prevails: Bach delights in leading the ear to expect one thing,

only to veer off in surprising new directions; then, in mid-flight, comes a dislocating change from Allegro assai (‘very

lively’) to Adagio (‘slow’) and the mood becomes darker, the

expression anguished. If we follow Alberti’s definition, this is

even less Classical than Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony. Instead

of soothing us with its ‘harmony and concord’, the symphony

cries out for some kind of interpretation: what is the emotional

‘story’ that unifies this volatile, eccentric, nervously brilliant

music?

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Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–1799)

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Sensitive Style




But if we are prompted to analyse this music, we should

beware of assuming that the changing moods represented byC.P.E. Bach are a direct reflection of his private emotional life.

A symphony by C.P.E. Bach is not an autobiography in sound

in the way that Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique , Mahler’s First

Symphony or Shostakovich’s Tenth clearly are. In this sense

C.P.E. Bach is not a Romantic. The aim of the empfindsame

Stil is the expression of emotion as a common human

experience, not an outpouring of personal pain or exultation.

It is ‘cultivated’ feeling, a play of emotions, not without an

element of mannerism. In fact for C.P.E. Bach there seems to

have been an element of conscious calculation, of deliberate

playing for effect – at least as far as certain kinds of audience

were concerned. In 1784 he gave this advice to a fellow

composer:

Permit me, in true affection, to teach you something for the

future. In things intended for the press, and thus for the

general public, you should be less ingenious and give more

sugar.

‘Mannerism’ – in the derogatory sense – is how many came to

see this expressively ‘sugared’ style. By the time Carl Dittersvon Dittersdorf (1739–1799) came to write his ‘Descriptive

Sinfonia’, The Delirium of the Composers , in the late 1770s,

Empfindsamkeit was, as Dittersdorf’s subtitle slyly notes, ‘The

Taste of the Day’, and a ripe target for mockery. The Delirium

of the Composers is no masterpiece (compared to

the Haydn and C.P.E. Bach examples above it is far too

repetitive), but as a comment on its times it is fascinating. It

shows that, for some musicians and connoisseurs, Sturm und

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Drang and the empfindsame Stil were already drifting towards

absurdity. At the same time, parody is a sure indication thatsomething has ‘arrived’, culturally speaking. Moreover it is

sometimes difficult to tell when parody shades over into

tribute. Although Dittersdorf makes sure that the ending of

this ‘Descriptive Sinfonia’ is jolly and down-to-earth – all

good clean fun, it seems to say – the nervous athleticism of

the finale’s opening theme (cellos and basses neatly imitating

the violins’ leading motif) is actually quite impressive. Haydn

might have made much of it, and there are some appealing

sensitive touches later on, like the violins’ sighing descents at

2’37” and 3’56”.

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Sensitive Style




IV. New Means to New Ends

Whether it was Sturm und Drang , Empfindsamkeit or just

plain entertainment, the new dramatic style of the Classical

era was also highly conducive to instrumental display.

Composers continued to produce outstanding music in the

concerto form (an innovation of the Baroque period) and in

music for solo instruments, especially for the new instrument

of the age, the piano – or, as the period-instrument movement

has taught us to call it, fortepiano. The name itself reflects a

fundamental aspect of its novelty. Unlike the favoured

Baroque keyboard instruments, the organ and the

harpsichord, the fortepiano was capable of rapid changes in

volume – hence ‘forte–piano’: ‘loud–soft’. The player could

now use subtle or extreme gradations of dynamic forexpressive effect, as could already be achieved by the violin

or the human voice. C.P.E. Bach’s beloved clavichord had also

been able to do this to a limited degree, but the sound

produced was generally so small that from a distance of more

than a few feet it was virtually inaudible.

The fortepiano now made public performance of dramatic,

emotionally complex keyboard music a real possibility. It also

greatly enriched private music-making, in particular providing

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Leopold Mozart offers sage advice on the importance of musical taste:

The good delivery of a composition in the present taste is

not as simple as those people believe who think they are

doing very well if, following their own ideas, they ornament

and contort a piece in a truly idiotic fashion and who have

no conception whatever of the passion that is supposed to

be expressed in it. But who are these people? In the mainthey are those who, since they can scarcely play in time,

even tolerably, begin at once with concertos and solos in

order (as they stupidly imagine) to establish themselves as

quickly as possible in the company of the virtuosi. Some

actually reach such a point that, in a few concertos or solos

that they have practiced thoroughly, they play off the most

difficult passages with uncommon facility. These they know

by heart. But if they are to perform even a few minuets in

the cantabile style directed by the composer, they are in noposition to do so – indeed one sees this already in the

concertos they have studied. For as long as they play an

Allegro , things still go well, but as soon as they come to an

Adagio , they betray their gross ignorance and their poor

judgement in every single measure of the piece. They play

without order and without expression; they fail to

distinguish the loud and the soft; the embellishments are

applied in the wrong places, too thickly crowded and for

the most part confused; sometimes, just the other way, the

notes are too expressionless and one sees that the player

does not know what to do. In such players one can seldom

hope any longer for improvement, for of all people they are

the most prepossessed in their own favour, and he would

incur their highest displeasure who sought, out of the

goodness of his heart, to persuade them of their mistakes.

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New Means to New Ends




a new opportunity for women. The idea of them as concert

soloists was widely regarded as improper in what was still avery patriarchal society; but a woman performing on the

keyboard in the home, even before an audience, was more

acceptable. In time the ability to play the piano came to be

seen as a near-indispensable accomplishment for young ladies

of the aristocracy and the rising middle classes. Some

achieved levels of competence comparable to that of the best

male musicians of their age; indeed many of the finest piano

sonatas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were written for

women. Haydn’s magnificent Variations in F minor

were composed in 1793 for Barbara von Ployer, daughter of a

Viennese court official and a star pupil of Mozart. Judging

from the instrumental writing, Ployer must have been not only

very accomplished but also a highly artistic pianist – the work

calls for sophisticated musical understanding as well as

technical flair.

Haydn subtitled the Variations ‘Un piccolo Divertimento’ –

‘a little diversion’ – but as a description that seems decidedly

ironic. This is an ambitious work, developing two related

themes, one in the minor, the other in the major (2’26”), and

showing off the late-eighteenth-century piano at its mostbrilliant and poetic. The roulades and arabesques of the

second major-key variation (10’03”) give the pianist plenty of

opportunity for scintillating virtuoso display. But it is the

extended, searching finale that really tests the player’s artistry.

It begins with a return of the minor-key first theme (11’25”),

but instead of rounding off neatly, as before, the theme breaks

up (12’20”), with long, pregnant silences. After some weirdly

searching chromatic harmonies (12’29”) there is an explosive

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climax, based on fragments of the theme and culminating in

high-wheeling right-hand displays (13’01”), before Haydnquietly pieces the elements of the theme back into some kind

of order. After the regular, balanced variation structure that

precedes it, this finale toys with the possibility of disorder,

fragmentation, even the ‘chaos’ Haydn was to represent so

imaginatively at the beginning of his oratorio The Creation

(1796–98). In other words, Classical ‘harmony and concord’

are embraced, mastered and then stretched to breaking point.

The Romantic revolution of Beethoven’s so-called middle

period now seems only a step or two around the corner.

Mozart embraced the new fortepiano as eagerly as Haydn,

but whereas the older composer’s most original and profound

writing for the instrument is found in his solo and chamber

works, Mozart also achieved great things in the form of the

piano concerto – perhaps more so here than in his solo piano

works. The piano’s new expressive powers also led Mozart

towards Romanticism, as we can hear in the first movement

of his deeply dramatic Piano Concerto in C minor, K. 491

. Beethoven was deeply impressed by this piece. Of

one passage towards the end of the finale he is said to have

remarked ruefully, ‘We shall never have an idea like that!’ AndBeethoven paid direct tribute to this work in the first

movement of his own C minor Piano Concerto (No. 3),

deliberately imitating Mozart’s stark opening theme and the

quietly rippling piano figures that end the movement (12’27”).

It’s also easy to imagine Beethoven admiring the piano’s

acutely expressive wide melodic leaps (2’43” etc.), and the

way the piano’s poetic, lyrical voice is often thrown intoextreme contrast with the orchestra’s elemental power. And

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New Means to New Ends




yet the listener may feel, listening to this movement, that this

is not yet fully fledged Romantic music, for all its dramaticintensity and pathos. A remark made by the American

composer Aaron Copland about the slow movement of

Gabriel Fauré’s Second Piano Quartet seems just as apt here:

‘its beauty is truly classic if we define Classicism as intensity

on a background of calm’.

The piano isn’t the only instrument new to the eighteenth

century that can be heard in Mozart’s C minor Piano

Concerto. The clarinet (which has its origins in an instrument

called the chalumeau) was developed in Germany at the

beginning of the eighteenth century, but only began to creep

into orchestras in Mozart’s time. Mozart loved its range of

colour (from sensual warmth to piercing brightness) and

phenomenal agility; he produced several great solo works for

it and included it in his later orchestral pieces as often as

possible. In the first movement of the C minor Piano Concerto

we hear it chuckling in its lower register (3’22”) as well as

taking its place as a singer in the woodwind choir (4’23” –

and many similar passages). But it was in solo and chamber

music that the clarinet really showed what it could do. In fast

music it could rival the piano in virtuosity and power, while inmelodic music it only just fell short of the human voice in

expressive range, as is shown by the slow movement from the

First Clarinet Concerto by Carl Stamitz (1745–1801).

This concerto was a huge success in its day (it first appeared

in print in 1786 but may have been composed in the late

1770s), and it seems to have made a deep impression on

Mozart: the eloquent, melancholic slow movement gives

some idea as to why.

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V. The Emergence of the Orchestra

Carl Stamitz was a second-generation composer, the son of

Johann Stamitz (1717–1757), who was leader and director of

the Mannheim Court Orchestra. This pioneering band of

musicians has been called ‘the Berlin Philharmonic of its day’,

while Charles Burney dubbed it ‘an army of generals’. But it

wasn’t just the quality of the musicianship that put Mannheim

at the vanguard of orchestral playing in the mid- to late-

eighteenth century. The size and instrumental constitution of

the orchestra were also innovatory. As well as the large, well-

drilled string section there were horns, trumpets, timpani and

all the principal woodwind instruments of the time, including

the new clarinet. After hearing the orchestra in 1778, the

twenty-two-year-old Mozart wrote ecstatically to his father:‘You cannot imagine the glorious effect of a symphony with

flutes, oboes and clarinets’. The experience only increased his

frustration at the limited resources and scope allowed him in

his native city of Salzburg.

But the Mannheim Court Orchestra also boasted

something else: in effect its own ‘house style’. Composers,

following the lead of Johann Stamitz, began to exploit the

new possibilities of this stunningly accomplished, colour-

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The Emergence of the Orchestra




Johann Stamitz (1717–1757)

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enriched band. In this they were encouraged by the

orchestra’s master, the Elector of Mannheim, Carl Theodor –an aristocrat, certainly, and in that respect a representative of

the old feudal order, but also a man of enlightened, forward-

looking beliefs and tastes. Even Carl Theodor’s gardens at his

palace in nearby Schwetzingen show how keen he was to

feature challenging new ideas, in particular the element of

dramatic surprise. (The Schwetzingen Grotto, for instance,

incorporates a striking visual illusion: the eye is momentarily

tricked into believing that it is viewing a landscape from a

great distance, when in reality it is only a few feet away.)

One can understand how much Carl Theodor would have

appreciated the innovations that became hallmarks of the

Mannheim symphonic style: the thrilling, upward-surging

‘Mannheim skyrocket’, the languishing ‘Mannheim sigh’,

and most of all the ‘Mannheim crescendo’. In all these

Johann Stamitz was the trailblazer, and it is indicative of

how much his efforts were valued that in the court record of

his death (aged just thirty-nine) he is described as ‘director

of court music, so expert in his art that his equal will hardly

be found’. Time has taken the edge off some of Stamitz’s

novel effects, but in the first movement of his Symphony inD major, Op. 3 No. 2 , we can still appreciate the

vitality and assurance of his art. The symphony begins with

six punchy chords followed by a sustained crescendo (a

gradual soft-to-loud build up, 0’07”–0’18”) for the full

orchestra. For modern listeners, used to the elemental

climaxes of Bruckner and Mahler, this will probably seem

very mild; but to audiences brought up on the evenlyregulated dynamics of Baroque orchestral music it was an

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Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809)

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astounding novelty. It is said that at some performances,

crescendos like this actually made people rise upspontaneously from their seats!

While such effects were easy for the eighteenth-century

orchestra or the fortepiano, they were beyond the reach of

long-established keyboard instruments like the harpsichord

and the organ. Not surprisingly, forward-looking composers

began to lose interest in those Baroque favourites. Attempts to

adapt their mechanisms to accommodate the new style were

failures. The decline in the number of compositions for organ

(and still more for harpsichord) is a striking trend of the late

eighteenth century. A masterpiece such as Mozart’s Fantasia in

F minor, K. 608 (1791, originally for mechanical organ) was a

rare exception. The Prelude and Fugue in C major for organ

duet (i.e. four hands at one set of keyboard) by

Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809) is hardly on the

same level as Mozart’s Fantasia, but it does illustrate the

problem with the new style rather entertainingly.

Albrechtsberger was organist and Kapellmeister at St Stephen’s

Cathedral, Vienna (a post he took up on Mozart’s

recommendation in 1793), and contemporary accounts make

it clear that he was an exceptionally gifted player. So onewould have thought that he would know well enough what

the organ could and couldn’t do. But hearing the instrument

that inspired some of J.S. Bach’s loftiest thoughts reduced to

piping out little rococo roulades and pirouettes has an

element of pathos – how are the mighty fallen!

The organ was not the only venerable instrument that

found itself being asked to perform strange new feats in the

late eighteenth century. Nowadays there is a tendency to think

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of the trombone as the orchestra’s resident comedian. In the

Baroque era, however, it was an instrument of some dignity,used in church music (where it often supported the choral

voices) and – by association – to illustrate weighty

supernatural events in opera: hence the use of the trombone

to accompany the voice of the oracle in Mozart’s Idomeneo or

the appearances of the spectrally animated statue in Don

Giovanni . Trombones did not appear in orchestral concert

music until Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1808), where their

connotations of religious pomp and power lend weight to the

triumph of the finale’s ‘revolutionary’ first theme. But in the

finale of the Trombone Concerto in G major by

Mozart’s father, Leopold Mozart (1719–1787), the instrument

becomes a surprisingly agile soloist.


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Leopold Mozart (1719–1787)

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Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805)

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Old and New: Conflict or Co-existence?




at heart, by nature set apart from the turbulent fashion of

his time.We must be clear about one thing, however: ‘fashion’

here means the forward-looking movements of the late

eighteenth century. Not all musical patrons were as

progressive in their thinking as Mannheim’s Carl Theodor –

as the young Mozart knew only too well. Count Heironymus

von Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg and Mozart’s

employer until one fateful day in 1781, was a man of

decidedly old-fashioned tastes and attitudes. For the

Archbishop a composer was a servant, with a job to perform,

and he had little patience with the young Mozart’s social

aspirations, or his musical tours with his father – ‘travelling

around like beggars’ was the Archbishop’s verdict. When

Mozart expressed the wish to be allowed to work in Vienna,Colloredo’s response was contemptuous. Matters came to a

head in June 1781, when Mozart attempted to present his

petition for release from the Archbishop’s service to his

official, Count Arco. The events of that day were vividly

recorded by Mozart in a letter to his father:

Instead of taking my petition or procuring me an audience oradvising me to send in the document later or persuading me

to let the matter lie and to consider things more carefully –

enfin, whatever he wanted – Count Arco hurls me out of the

room and gives me a kick on my behind. Well, that means in

our language that Salzburg is no longer the place for me,

except to give me a favourable opportunity of returning the

Count’s kick, even if it should have to be in the public street.

The Serenata notturna, K. 239 was written in 1776,

when Mozart was still in the Archbishop’s service, and it gives


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The great flautist, composer and musical commentatorJ.J. Quantz, whose life straddled the Baroque and Classical

eras, offers a contemporary perspective on the striking

differences between music of different countries:

The Italians were formerly accustomed to call the German

taste in music un gusto barbaro – ‘a barbarous taste’. But

now that it has come to pass that several German composers

have been in Italy, where they have had opportunities to

perform works of theirs with success, both operas and

instrumental music, and since at the present time the operas

which the Italians find most tasteful, and rightly so, are

actually the productions of a German pen [that of Johann

Adolf Hasse], the prejudice has gradually been removed. It

must be said, however, that the Germans are indebted –

deeply to the Italians and somewhat to the French – for this

favourable change in their taste. Everyone knows that, for

more than a century, Italian and French composers, singers,and instrumentalists have been in service and have

performed operas at various German courts – at Vienna,

Dresden, Berlin, Hanover, Munich, Ansbach, and many

others. Everyone knows that great lords have sent many of

their musicians to Italy and France and that, as I have said

before, many of the improvers of German taste have visited

one or both of these countries. These have adopted the taste

of the one or the other and have hit upon a mixture which

has enabled them to write and to perform with success, not

only German, but also Italian, French, and English operas

and other Singspiele, each in its own language and taste. We

cannot say as much of the Italian composers or of the

French. It is not that they lacked the necessary talent, but

rather that they gave themselves little pains to learn foreign

languages and that they could not persuade themselves that,

apart from them and without their language, respectable

accomplishment in vocal music was still a possibility.

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some idea of the kind of ‘functional’ music he was expected

to provide. Although Mozart does allow himself some impishhumour in the finale (possibly in reference to a topical theme),

the Minuet is stately and well mannered, with a Baroque

neatness in its formal layout – there’s no room here for ear-

catching brilliance or surprises. On the whole, Mozart seems

to have regarded this sort of commission as hackwork; though

if that is the case, he performs the task with distinction.

But while the old feudal world continued to preen itself to

the accompaniment of music like Mozart’s Serenata notturna,

there must have been some figures at that Salzburg society

gathering in 1776 who were aware that change was in the air.

In that same year the British economist Adam Smith published

The Wealth of Nations , a milestone in the rise of liberal

capitalism and the commercial middle classes. And Joseph II

of Austria, titular ruler of that elusive entity The Holy Roman

Empire, was soon to begin the process of abolishing serfdom

and secularising church property – for which the young

Beethoven was to honour him in one of the most impressive

of his early works, the Cantata on the Death of the Emperor

Joseph II (1790). Also in 1776, under pressure from the

privileged classes, the King of France, Louis XVI, dismissed hisController General of Finances, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot,

who had been demanding economic reform. But far from

calming the situation, Louis’s reactionary measures caused a

surge of resentment, culminating in the outbreak of revolution

in 1789, his execution, and proclamation of the First Republic

in 1793. Before long the Napoleonic Wars were spreading

terror and confusion throughout the continent of Europe.

Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815, but

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although the great European powers made a half-concerted

attempt to re-impose pre-revolutionary order, the world hadchanged too much during those intervening years. The middle

classes now held far greater shares of power and influence,

and composers across the world had thrown off the shackles

of liveried service in exchange for financial independence and

the possibility of a new, enhanced social status as Romantic

‘genius’. Mozart’s departure from the service of Archbishop

Colloredo may have been undignified, and his subsequent

attempts to make a living as a freelance composer may have

ended in tragic failure, but with hindsight both can be seen as

important steps towards the elevation of the composer as

artist-hero.

It would have been extraordinary if music had not

registered the shock waves of all this epochal change. Indeed,

examples are not hard to find. Take the opening Kyrie

movement from Haydn’s Mass in D minor (1798), widely

known by its nickname of ‘Nelson Mass’, though originally

entitled Missa in angustiis – ‘Mass in Time of Fear’ .

Haydn had already written a ‘Mass in Time of War’ (Missa in

tempore belli ) two years earlier; but compared to the Kyrie of

that earlier work, the opening movement of the ‘Nelson Mass’is extraordinarily dramatic, and clearly bears the imprint of its

time. Haydn is said to have written the Missa in angustiis after

hearing news of Nelson’s victory over Napoleon in the sea

battle at Aboukir, off the coast of Egypt, and ultimately the

work’s mood is one of celebration – it was performed in

Nelson’s honour when the Admiral and Lady Emma Hamilton

passed through Austria in 1800. According to legend, Haydn

added the apocalyptic trumpet call in the Benedictus in


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response to the courier’s own trumpet fanfare when the news

was announced at the palace of Haydn’s employer, PrinceNicolaus Esterházy, who had succeeded Prince Paul in 1762.

But in the Kyrie the mood is far from triumphant. The stark,

repeated-note trumpet and drum tattoos, the chorus’s

anguished shouts of ‘Kyrie eleison’ (‘Lord have mercy’), and

the rising desperation of the soprano solo towards the end

would not have been out of place in the opera house. In

church the effect must have been electrifying.

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VII. Revolution in the Opera House

As so often in history, the church lagged behind the secular

cultural institutions in adapting to the spirit of the times. Big

changes had been registered in the opera houses long before

the first performance of Haydn’s ‘Nelson Mass’. Composers still

made use of the old Classical themes: myths or historical events

from ancient Greece and Rome continued to form the basis of

operatic plots – as for instance in Mozart’s last opera, Laclemenza di Tito (‘The Clemency of Titus’) of 1791. But the

highly formalised character of early-eighteenth-century opera

seria had begun to develop into something more dramatically

fluid. The influence of the new symphonic style was one force

for change, as were the innovations of comic opera – which

was far ahead of tragedy in incorporating the new elements of surprise, formal freedom and even sensitive expressive style. It is

striking that three of Mozart’s best-loved – and most would say

greatest – operas, Le nozze di Figaro (‘The Marriage of Figaro’),

Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte , are comedies (despite the

deep seriousness of some of their content): comic opera was the

form in which Mozart the dramatist clearly felt at his most free.

Mozart had also been impressed by the new formal

suppleness brought to serious opera by the great German

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Revolution in the Opera House




Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782)

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innovator Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–1787) and

to a certain extent by C.P.E. Bach’s younger brother JohannChristian Bach (1735–1782). In 1778, Mozart informed

his father:

For practice, I have just set to music the aria ‘Non so d’onde

viene’, which has been so beautifully composed by [J.C.]

Bach. Just because I know Bach’s setting so well and like it so

much, and because it is always ringing in my ears, I wished to

see whether in spite of all this I could not write an aria totallyunlike his.

Mozart was particularly taken with J.C. Bach’s opera Lucio

Silla , written in 1772. Listening to the final part of

the opera’s overture one can appreciate how the freshness and

vitality of Bach’s writing would have appealed to the younger

man. Clearly Mozart wasn’t always so intent on sounding‘totally unlike’ his older contemporary.

A new spirit was blowing through the Classical groves and

grottos that formed the settings of opera seria. And while J.C.

Bach played his part in the freeing up of serious opera, the

decisive challenge came with the works of Gluck. While

maintaining Classical plots and characters, Gluck was

anything but Classical (in the early-eighteenth-century sense)when it came to the music with which he fleshed them out.

‘There is no musical rule that I have not willingly sacrificed to

dramatic effect,’ he said on one occasion. On being told

about another composer’s recent operatic success he retorted:

‘Yes, but does it draw blood?’ Gluck’s apparent disregard for

the well-founded rules of operatic composition is said to have

drawn exasperated criticism from that towering master of

Baroque opera seria, George Frideric Handel: ‘My cook


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“There is no musical rule that I have not willingly sacrificed to dramatic effect.”

Preface to Alceste (1767)

Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–1787)

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knows more about counterpoint than he does!’ But Handel –

who introduced several striking dramatic innovations into hisoperas and oratorios – was more admiring of Gluck’s

pioneering spirit than that remark suggests. And Gluck made

no secret of his own sense of indebtedness to the older

German Meister, as the Irish tenor Michael Kelly noted in his

Reminiscences (published in 1826):

One morning, after I had been singing with him, he said,‘Follow me up stairs, Sir, and I will introduce you to one,

whom, all my life, I have made my study, and endeavoured to

imitate.’ I followed him into his bed-room, and, opposite to

the head of the bed, saw a full-length picture of Handel, in a

rich frame. ‘There, Sir,’ said he, ‘is the portrait of the inspired

master of our art; when I open my eyes in the morning, I look

upon him with reverential awe, and acknowledge him as

such, and the highest praise is due to your country for havingdistinguished and cherished his gigantic genius.’

Listening to any of Handel’s greatest operas, with their

extended, highly expressive recitative and innovative rhythmic

freedom, it’s easy to understand why Gluck found Handel so

inspiring. But what he built on those foundations is just as

impressive. One of Gluck’s greatest breakthroughs came withhis opera Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) , which retells

the ancient Greek legend of the divinely inspired musician

Orpheus and his descent into Hades to rescue the soul of his

beloved Eurydice. Orfeo ed Euridice has the distinction of

being the first opera never to have left the repertoire since its

first performance. The arch-Romantics Berlioz and Wagner

both revered and imitated it, and listening to the opening

chorus it’s not difficult to understand why. The poised

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The composer A.E.M. Grétry, writing in his memoirs in

1797, recalls the thrill of Gluck’s operatic genius:

Beyond doubt we owe much to the Chevalier Gluck for the

masterpieces with which he has enriched our theatre. To

his truly dramatic genius should have been confided the

administration of a form of entertainment to which he hadgiven a new birth by his immortal productions and of

which he would have maintained the order and the vigour

by his intelligence and by that transcendence which the

superiority of talents confers. It is especially by encouraging

men of letters, by having referred to himself the different

poems that they compose, that it would be easy for a

director like Gluck to employ each musician in his own

genre. It often happens that a young composer or performerloses several years, perhaps his whole life, seeking what is

suitable for him, whereas he could have been settled in a

moment.

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symmetry of Baroque opera is discarded in favour of a new

economy and directness of expression. In this first sceneOrpheus and the chorus are gathered at Eurydice’s tomb. The

orchestral introduction immediately sets the lamenting tone,

which the chorus intensifies with sharply expressive

dissonances. But most devastating of all are Orpheus’s

desperate interjections (originally high countertenor but sung

on this recording by a female soprano). Orpheus simply cries

out the name ‘Euridice’ – this is no longer a formalised

‘attitude’ of grief: it is naked emotion.

Gluck’s innovations also affected the very structure of the

aria. In opera seria, arias were normally laid out on a static,

neatly balanced A–B–A pattern. Section A usually deals with

one aspect of the character’s situation; section B then views it

from another angle before a straight recapitulation of A,though with scope for the singer to decorate and expressively

enhance the melodic line. But the arias of Orfeo abandon

such elegant formal decorum. Abrupt tempo changes, sudden

interjections of animated recitative and strikingly varied

recapitulations give a sense of emotional flux – a more lifelike

portrayal of a human being in the throes of passion. We also

find a new simplicity, with a minimum of superfluous

ornament. According to Charles Burney, this is at least partly a

result of what Gluck heard during his visit to London during

the years 1745–6:

He then studied the English taste; remarked particularly what

the audience seemed most to feel; and finding that plainness

and simplicity had the greatest effect upon them, he has, eversince that time, endeavoured to write for the voice, more in

the natural tones of the human affections and passions, than

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to flatter the lovers of deep science or difficult execution; and

it may be remarked, that most of his airs in Orfeo are as plainand simple as English ballads.

But what mattered above all else in opera, Gluck wrote to the

editor of the French journal Mercure de France in 1773, was

the composer’s engagement with the words. In this, said

Gluck, he had been particularly fortunate in his choice of

librettist, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi:

This author, full of genius and talent, has in his poems of

Orfeo , of Alceste and of Paride followed a path little known

to the Italians. These works are filled with those happy

situations, those terrible and pathetic strokes, which furnish to

the composer the means of expressing the great passions and

of creating a music energetic and touching. Whatever the

talent of the composer, he will never compose any but

mediocre music if the poet does not arouse in him thatenthusiasm without which the productions of all the arts are

feeble and languid; the imitation of nature is by general

agreement their common object. It is this which I seek to

attain. Always simple and natural, so far as is within my

power, my music is directed only to the greatest expression

and to the reinforcement of the declamation of poetry.

‘Always simple and natural…’, ‘the greatest expression andthe reinforcement of the declamation’ – nowhere are these

qualities more evident than in Orpheus’s famous aria ‘Che

farò senza Euridice?’ (‘What shall I do without Euridice?’) that

forms the climax of Act III. It begins with one of Gluck’s most

beguiling melodies, but at 0’44” the vocal line breaks down

into simple declamations of the name ‘Euridice’; later the

melody is interrupted by broken, impassioned recitative

(1’57”), leading to lamenting falling phrases at ‘Ah non

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m’avanza’ (‘Ah there is no one to help me’). The first melody

returns, but this time Orpheus’s outpourings of grief culminatein wide-leaping phrases at the repetition of ‘Dove andro’

(‘Where shall I go?’; 2’52”). The words set the scene which is

then intensified by the music.

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Gluck’s remarks on nature, simplicity and the direct

expression of emotion represent the artistic end of the

spectrum of ideas associated with the writings of Jean-Jacques

Rousseau (mentioned earlier). But Rousseau wasn’t only

interested in freeing the soul in a spiritual or psychological

sense. There was an important political dimension too, as

Rousseau spelt out in his book The Social Contract (1762). Thebook’s first sentence – ‘Man is born free, yet everywhere he is

in chains’ – has become a sacred saying for political

revolutionaries from Rousseau’s time to the present day. The

old order viewed The Social Contract with undisguised horror.

Rousseau’s writings were banned and warrants for his arrest

were published in Geneva and Paris. Though Rousseau did

not live to see the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789,

for many of the revolutionaries he was simply the modern

philosopher. The proclamations of Louis de Saint-Just,

collaborator with Robespierre in the French Republic’s

notorious Committee of Public Safety (1793–94), are saturated

in Rousseau’s language, with its central stress on nature:

Soon the enlightened nations will put on trial those who have

hitherto ruled over them. The kings shall flee into the deserts,

VIII. Mass Movementsand Secret Societies

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into the company of the wild beasts whom they resemble;

and Nature shall resume her rights.

Meanwhile in Mozart’s Austria another movement was

gaining pace among the intellectual elite: Freemasonry.

Suppressed in some countries, and condemned by a Papal

Bull in 1738, Freemasonry thrived in Catholic Austria, thanks

to the patronage of the Duke Franz Stephan – later Emperor

Franz I. Lists of members of Austrian Masonic Lodges containan impressive array of prominent citizens, ranging from the

aristocracy, the military and civil servants, to bankers,

merchants, writers and musicians. Mozart joined the

Freemasons in December 1784. Desire for professional

advancement may have been partly responsible for this move,

and Mozart certainly looked to fellow members of his Lodge

for help in times of financial stress. Twenty letters from

Mozart to a rich fellow mason and music lover, Michael

Puchberg, survive. They make distressing reading, revealing

how often Mozart had to swallow his pride and beg for help.

These extracts from various letters to Puchberg in 1788 are all

too typical:

Dearest Brother,

Your true friendship and brotherly love emboldens me to

ask you for a great favour: I still owe you 8 ducats – and

not only am I unable at the moment to repay them, but

my confidence in you is so great that I venture to beg you

to help me, only until next week (when my concerts at

the Casino begin), with the loan of 100 fl.; the

subscription money cannot fail to be in my hands by thattime, and I can quite easily repay you 136 fl., with my

warmest thanks…

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Mass Movements and Secret Societies




The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau muses on

man and force in a chapter entitled ‘The Right of the

Strongest’ from his classic political treatise, The Social

Contract :

The strongest man is never strong enough to be master all

the time, unless he transforms force into right and

obedience into duty. Hence ‘the right of the strongest’ – a‘right’ that sounds like something intended ironically, but is

actually laid down as a principle. But shall we never have

this phrase explained? Force is a physical power; I do not

see how its effects could produce morality. To yield to force

is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an act of

prudence. In what sense can it be a moral duty?

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Now I look forward eagerly to your reply – and truly, to a

favourable reply ; and I do not know, but I take you for aman who, like myself , when he can do so, will surely assist

his friend, if he is a true friend, his brother if indeed his

brother. Should you perhaps be unable to spare such a sum

at once, I entreat you to lend me until tomorrow at least acouple of hundred guilders , for my landlord in the

Landstrasse was so insistent that I was obliged to pay him

on the spot (to avoid unpleasantness), which has greatly

upset my finances…

Amid my toils and anxieties I have brought my affairs to such

a pass that I must needs raise a little money on these 2

pawnbroker’s tickets. I implore you by our friendship to do

me this favour, but it must be done instantly. Forgive my

importunity, but you know my circumstance. Ah, had you but

done as I asked you! If you do it even now, all will go as I

wish…

Letters like these have been put forward as evidence that

Mozart’s devotion to his Masonic Lodge was really a disguise

for cynical, opportunistic motives. But surely it is easy to

forgive him trying to exploit the ideal of brotherhood when his

now completely freelance career as composer and pianist

looked so precarious. And Puchberg’s own faith in Mozart

seems to have survived the stream of begging letters. It was to

Puchberg that Haydn wrote from London when he heard the

news of Mozart’s death in 1791:

For some time I was beside myself about his death and

could not believe that Providence would soon claim the

life of such an indispensable man. I only regret that before

his death he could not convince the English, who arebenighted in this respect, of his greatness – a subject about

which I have been preaching to them every single day.

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All the evidence is that Puchberg agreed wholeheartedly with

Haydn about the ‘indispensability’ of his brother-mason.Would he have thought so if he had suspected Mozart of

insincerity? No, there are plenty of indications that Mozart

took the teachings of the Masonic Lodge very seriously.

A letter to his father, dated 4 April 1787, shows Mozart

immersing himself in the Masonic philosophy of death:

As death (considered precisely) is the real purpose of ourlife, for several years I have become so closely acquainted

with this true and best friend of our life, that his image is

not only no longer terrifying to me, but rather something

very soothing and comforting! And I thank my God for

affording me, in His grace, the opportunity (you understand

me) of realising that he is the key to our real happiness. I

never lie down in bed without thinking that (young as I am)

I may not live to see the next day – and yet no one,especially among those who know me, can say that in daily

life I am stubborn or sad – and for this happiness I give

thanks to my Creator every day and wish every man the

same from the bottom of my heart.

But it was not the Freemasons’ teaching of death as ‘true and

best friend’ that alarmed conservative authorities; it was their

views on brotherhood and social justice. Among the membersof Mozart’s Viennese Lodge was the writer Johann Caspar

Riesbeck, who in 1787 published his Travel through

Germany , in a series of letters. Nominally a travel book, it was

full of inflammatory observations, such as:

The clearest proof that a country is unhappy is the

confrontation between the greatest magnificence and themost wretched poverty, and the greater the confrontation, the

unhappier the country.

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For all its mystical veneer and arcane symbolism, Masonic

thinking was more rationalist than Rousseau’s naturalism; butits abhorrence of class distinction, anti-clericalism and

concern for universal justice made it highly attractive to

educated men with revolutionary leanings. And Mozart seems

to have made himself very much at home in this intellectual

milieu, so much so that he continued to be an active member

of his Lodge even after the ‘reforming’ Emperor Joseph II

imposed stringent restrictions in the order in 1789. One of his

last completed compositions, Eine kleine Freimaurer-Kantate

(‘A little Freemasonic Cantata’), K. 623, was written especially

for his Lodge. Just how deeply Mozart shared the Masons’

antipathy to class distinction and injustice becomes clear

when we look at his operas Le nozze di Figaro and Don

Giovanni .

But the opera in which Mozart’s commitment to

Freemasonry is most obvious is Die Zauberflöte (‘The Magic

Flute’, 1791) . In comparison to Figaro , Don

Giovanni and Così fan tutte , this is popular opera, with a text

in the vernacular (German) rather than Italian (the preferred

language of Court opera), spoken dialogue in place of the

more artificial recitative, and clearly intended to beaccompanied by plenty of spectacular theatrical effects. And

yet it is clear that Mozart felt this lower-class genre to be a

fitting medium through which to communicate sacred

Masonic truths. The very fabric of the music is full of Masonic

symbolism, most strikingly the three imposing chords for full

orchestra that begin the Overture (the number three has

particular significance in Masonic ritual); then there are the

mysterious three ladies in attendance on the Queen of the


62





Night, and the three boys who encourage the hero Prince

Tamino to undergo various ordeals for admission to thebrotherhood. The basis of the plot is a clear contest between

good (Sarastro) and evil (the Queen of the Night), with good

presented as male and rational, and evil as female and

dominated by passion. But there are more personal

connections between Die Zauberflöte and Mozart’s

Freemasonry. Mozart and his librettist Emanuel Schikaneder (a

fellow mason) partly modelled Sarastro on Ignaz von Born,

the Master of their Lodge – an outstanding scientist and the

author of an essay, Mysteries of the Freemasons (1784), which

provided some of the wording for Sarastro’s utterances. In the

dignified, gravely eloquent aria ‘In diesen heil’gen Hallen’ we

could be hearing a portrait of Born elucidating the precepts of

Masonry: ‘In these holy halls there is no place for revenge,

and a man must allow love to lead him to duty.’

In spite of Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s best efforts,

however, the aria most people remember above all from Die

Zauberflöte is not one of Sarastro’s pious, eminently rational

homilies, but the Queen of the Night’s virtuoso ‘Der Hölle

Rache’ (‘Hell’s Revenge Boils in my Heart’) with its

scintillating high Fs and dark, surging orchestralaccompaniment. Readers who are familiar with the works of

William Blake may well be reminded of Blake’s famous

verdict on Milton, contained in his Marriage of Heaven and

Hell (a work almost exactly contemporary with Die

Zauberflöte ): ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he

wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and

Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party

without knowing it.’

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The audiences that thrilled to the first performances of Die

Zauberflöte in 1791 may have seen it as a simple story of thetriumph of good over evil, or perhaps they just relished the

fine tunes, the comedy and the special effects. Mozart

patently enjoyed entering into the comedic spirit, as he

recorded in a letter to his wife dated 7–8 October 1791. As

usual Schikaneder was playing the part of the bird-catcher

Papageno. For one aria Schikaneder had to mime playing the

glockenspiel, which he seems to have done very convincingly,

until Mozart caught him out:

I went onto the stage in Papageno’s aria with the

Glöckchenspiel , [sic] because today I felt an impulse to play

it myself. I played a joke on Schikaneder: where he has a

pause, I played an arpeggio – he started – looked off-stage

and saw me. When the second pause came, I did nothing –

so he waited and would not go on. I guessed what he was

thinking and played another chord – whereat he hit the

Glöckchenspiel and said ‘hold your tongue’ – at which

everybody laughed – I think this joke made many people

notice for the first time that he does not play the instrument

himself.

But, amid all the fun and theatrical excitement, there musthave been some who heard echoes of sensational recent

events in Die Zauberflöte , not least in Sarastro’s final eulogy:

‘The sun’s rays expel night and destroy the insidious power of

hypocrisy’. In 1789, just two years earlier, a massed uprising

by the citizens of Paris had culminated in the storming of the

state prison, the Bastille, on 14 July – a date still celebrated as

a public holiday in modern France. Less than a month later,

on 6 August, the Revolution honoured its martyred dead with

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François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829)

65





a performance of the Grande Messe des Morts (‘Grand Mass

for the Dead’) by François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829), aFrench composer of Walloon (French-Netherlands) birth, who

had made no secret of his revolutionary sympathies. In 1769

Gossec had founded the Concert des Amateurs, which soon

acquired a reputation as one of the world’s finest orchestras.

The use of the word ‘amateur’ is significant. It is here used in

its original sense of ‘lover’, with suggestions of ‘connoisseur’.

The amateur was a new phenomenon – a sign of the way in

which society was changing. Though generally educated and

affluent, amateurs were as likely to come from the emergent

middle classes as from the old nobility. Amateur events were

supported not by noble or royal patronage but by public

subscription. Something much closer to the modern bourgeois

concert hall had been born.

Gossec had written his Grande Messe des Morts

in 1760, but the work really came into its own with

the dawning of the Revolution. Stylistically, the music is

fascinatingly poised between the old and the new. This is well

illustrated by the first two sections of the Dies irae (‘Day of

Wrath’), that part of the old Latin Requiem rite that deals with

the Day of Judgement. It begins with jagged string rhythms,strongly Baroque in flavour. The chorus then vividly depicts

the terror of Divine wrath. At the words ‘Quantus tremor est

futurus’ (‘What trembling there will be’; 1’46”), chorus and

strings create a ‘trembling’ effect with quick repeated notes on

each syllable. Then massed brass instruments, placed apart

from the main chorus and orchestra, depict the sounding of

the Last Trumpet in the ‘Tuba mirum’, impressively

punctuating the awe-struck bass solo. Berlioz is said to have


66





got the idea for the use of massed offstage brass bands in his

own Grande Messe des Morts (1837) from this passage. And itmust have sounded thrillingly apt to the victorious Parisian

revolutionaries at that 1789 performance: Judgement Day for

the old order.

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of my family, and of all the friends I have left – and of these

you are the most valued of all… Oh, my dear good lady, howsweet is some degree of liberty! I had a good Prince, but was

obliged at times to be dependent on base souls. I often

sighed for release, and now I have it in some measure. I am

quite sensible of this benefit, though my mind is burdened

with more work. The consciousness of being no longer a

bond-servant sweetens all my toils.

As well as being fêted virtually everywhere he went, Haydnreceived the kind of notices of which most composers can

only dream. If there were any dissenting voices, their

opinions have not survived. A good example of the general

tone can be found in a review of a London concert given on

17 February 1792. The programme, which included the first

performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 93 in D major, was

directed by the brilliant violinist and impresario Johann PeterSalomon – the ‘Mon. Salomon’ mentioned in the above-

quoted letter:

SALOMON’S CONCERT

The first Subscription Concert took place last Friday, at

Hanover Square. The established musical judges present

all agreed that it went off with surprising effect and rigidexactness. No Band in the World can go better. A new

Overture [Symphony] from the pen of the incomparable

Haydn, formed one considerable branch of this

stupendous musical tree. Such a combination of

excellence was contained in every movement, as inspired

all the performers as well as the audience with enthusiastic

ardour. Novelty of idea, agreeable caprice, and whim

combined with all Haydn’s sublime and wanten [sic]grandeur, gave additional consequence to the soul and

feelings of every individual present.

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Surprises and Subversion




Certain words and phrases in that review are particularly telling.

Note the critic’s initial remark on ‘surprising effect’. Surprise is akey element in Haydn’s symphonic style; it is no accident that

Haydn’s next symphony, No. 94 in G major, bears the nickname

‘The Surprise’ . But the critic praises the music’s

‘novelty’ and ‘agreeable caprice’, too, and also – in a

particularly memorable phrase – its ‘sublime and wanton

grandeur’. In later years Haydn may have gained a reputation as

a prankster, one who delighted in making ladies jump out of

their seats with sudden fortissimo chords. For that unnamed

London critic, ‘caprice and whim’ are only one side of the coin,

the other being the ‘sublime’. The meaning of this word has

changed significantly since Haydn’s day. Nowadays it tends to

mean anything from ‘loftily spiritual’ to simply ‘impressive’, or

even ‘soothing’. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries it was more often used to indicate something ‘awe-

inspiring’, a ‘terrifying grandeur’ that shook the beholder to the

core. On one level, the optical illusion in Elector Carl Theodor’s

Grotto at Schwetzingen (referred to earlier) was an ‘agreeable

caprice’. But on another it was meant to shock: to make the

spectators lose their bearings for a moment, to doubt the

accuracy of their perceptions and perhaps to question theirplace in a supposedly rational, predictable universe. This vogue

for sublime surprise, extending even to landscape gardening,

was lampooned by the English satirical novelist Thomas Love

Peacock in his Headlong Hall (1816). The first speaker is Sir

Patrick O’Prism, champion of what he calls ‘the picturesque’:

‘I distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add tothem, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct

character, which I call unexpectedness .’


72





‘Pray sir,’ said Mr Milestone, ‘by what name do you

distinguish this character, when a person walks round thegrounds for the second time?’

It is true that repeated performances have robbed the most

famous surprise in Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 of some of its

original shock value. The moment in question comes near the

start of the slow movement. A sudden fortissimo , reinforced

by trumpets and drums (0’29”), in the middle of an innocuous

quiet tune for strings, is unlikely to cause many tremors in

audiences accustomed to twenty-first-century horror movies.

But this is only an appetiser. With the sudden stark change to

the minor key (1’56”) the phrase ‘sublime and wanton

grandeur’ becomes more plausible. Still more impressive is

the first theme’s massively scored major-key apotheosis

(3’55”), all the more unexpected after the delicately scoredversion of the theme for flute, oboe and violins that precedes

it. Beethoven almost certainly remembered this moment when

he made the full orchestra break out in triumphant C major

fanfares in the slow movement of his own Fifth Symphony

(1804–8) – Beethoven’s revolutionary ‘sublime’ and Haydn’s

‘agreeable caprice’ are more closely related than we might

initially suspect.Haydn’s music also poses challenges through his highly

developed, often subtly subversive musical wit. There are

examples of this in the symphonies, but the medium in which

we encounter it most often is in that form beloved of

connoisseurs: the string quartet. This, at least in the form we

know it, is another invention of the so-called Classical era.

The use of four solo strings – most conveniently two violins,

viola and cello – as a vehicle for private, intimate

73





performance of orchestral works was established before

Haydn. In some of Haydn’s earlier sets of quartets (alsopublished as ‘Divertimentos’) it isn’t clear whether Haydn had

solo or multiple strings specifically in mind. But it was Haydn,

above all, who realised the solo string quartet’s potential for

the communication of a more sophisticated kind of

symphonic thought. It is a measure of the scale and

consequence of Haydn’s achievement that his pupil

Beethoven eventually came to regard the quartet as a fitting

medium for the most profound utterances of his last years.

What Beethoven achieved may have gone beyond Haydn’s

imaginings, but it was Haydn who laid the foundations on

which Beethoven built.

In the late eighteenth century, quartets were commonly

published in sets of three or six – hence the somewhat

confusing numbering: ‘Op. 33 No. 2’ actually means the

second of six quartets Haydn completed as Op. 33 in the year

1781. The publication of the Op. 33 quartets was a key event

in the history of instrumental music. Haydn had already

attracted much favourable attention through his impressive set

of six Op. 20 quartets; but in the letters that announced the

appearance of Op. 33, Haydn declared that he had writtenthese latest quartets ‘in a new and special way’. This was, of

course, shrewd marketing; but it was also grounded in fact.

Certainly we find Haydn taking risks and teasing audience

expectations as never before in quartet music. A striking

example comes in the finale of Op. 33 No. 2 in E flat,

nicknamed ‘The Joke’ . The movement starts out as a

sprightly, dancing Presto and for a while it all seems plain

sailing. Then at 2’55” comes a pause, and the four strings play


74





J.F. Reichardt, writing in 1808, looks back on Haydn as the

father of the string quartet:

10 December 1808

Today I must speak to you about a very fine quartet series

that Herr Schuppanzigh, an excellent violinist in the service

of Prince von Rasoumowsky, the former Russian envoy tothe imperial court, has opened by subscription for the

winter. The concerts will take place in a private house every

Thursday from twelve to two. Last Thursday we heard the

first one; there was as yet no great company in attendance,

but what there was consisted entirely of ardent and attentive

friends of music, precisely the proper public for this most

elegant and most congenial of all musical combinations.

Had Haydn given us only the quartet, inspiring other genial

artists to follow his example, it would already have been

enough to make him a great benefactor of the whole world

of music. Difficult as it is to bring this sort of music to

perfection in performance – for the whole and each of its

single parts are heard in their entirety and satisfy only in the

most perfect intonation, ensemble, and blending – it is the

first variety to be provided wherever good friends of music

meet to play together. And since it is charitably rooted in

the human make-up that expectation and capacity as a rulekeep more or less in step and go hand in hand, each one

takes at least some degree of pleasure in the performance,

once he has brought to it all that he can offer it individually

or through his immediate background. On this account the

exacting connoisseur and critic not infrequently finds such

groups working away with great enthusiasm, perfectly at

home, when he himself, spurred by his overtrained artistic

nature, would like to run away.

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cello leads (0’50”), lightly accompanied in the treble. Then at

1’09” the viola imitates the leader, second violin joining on aheld note a few seconds later. All four strings combine to end

the Trio (1’22”), before the repeat of the Scherzo. The effect is

rather like listening to a civilised discussion around a dinner

table: the host initiates, but everyone has their own

contribution to make.

In 1782, the year Haydn’s Op. 33 was published, Mozart

was just setting out on his perilous career as a freelance

composer in Vienna. He was so impressed by what Haydn

had achieved in these quartets that he immediately started

working on a set of six quartets of his own. He didn’t finish

them until 1785 (there was the small matter of having to make

a living for himself and his new wife), but when he had, he

sent them to Haydn with an accompanying letter – surely oneof the most touching dedications from one composer to

another in the history of music:

Vienna, 1 September 1785

To my dear friend Haydn.

A father who had decided to send out his sons into the greatworld, thought it his duty to entrust them to the protection

and guidance of a man who was very celebrated at the time

and who, moreover, happened to be his best friend.

In like manner I send my six sons to you, most celebrated and

very dear friend. They are, indeed, the fruit of a long and

laborious study; but the hope which many friends have given

me that this toil will be in some degree rewarded, encouragesme and flatters me with the thought that these children may

one day prove a source of consolation to me.

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During your last stay in this capital you yourself, my very dear

friend, expressed to me your approval of these compositions.Your good opinion encourages me to offer them to you and

leads me to hope that you will not consider them wholly

unworthy of your favour. Please then receive them kindly and

be to them a father, guide and friend! From this moment I

surrender to you all my rights over them. I entreat you,

however, to be indulgent to those faults which may have

escaped a father’s partial eye, and, in spite of them, to

continue your generous friendship towards one who so highly

appreciates it. Meanwhile, I remain with all my heart, dearestfriend, your most sincere friend.

W.A. Mozart

Haydn’s reaction to Mozart’s six quartets was equally

generous, as a delighted Leopold wrote in a letter to Mozart’s

sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’) on 16 February 1785:

On Saturday Herr Joseph Haydn and the two Barons Tinti

visited us, the new quartets were played, but only the 3 new

ones [presumably Op. 33 Nos 4–6], which he has composed

in addition to the other 3, which we already have – it is true

they are a little easier, but most excellently composed. Herr

Haydn said to me: ‘I say to you before God, on my word of

honour, your son is the greatest composer whom I know personally or by name ; he has taste and the greatest skill in

composition as well.’

The six quartets Mozart wrote as a reaction to Haydn’s

Op. 33 set have come to be known – somewhat confusingly –

as the ‘Haydn’ quartets. But the nickname is justified. Mozart

clearly learned a great deal from the Op. 33 set, not least in

terms of wit and the move towards greater equality in the

quartet ensemble. We can hear both of those ‘Haydnish’

characteristics in the finale of Mozart’s Third ‘Haydn’

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Quartet – K. 428 in E flat major . At the beginning

we hear a cheeky tune – or, rather, little scraps of a tunepunctuated by silences. At 0’27” the tune returns, with the

scraps now passed rapidly between the four instruments.

Throughout this lively movement one can hear the ideas

moving around the texture like this, alongside several

examples of gentle Haydnesque teasing of the listener’s

expectations. But near the end comes a particularly delicious

touch. At 4’31” the thematic scraps are again passed around

the ensemble, breaking up as the music slows down. Then the

first theme returns at 4’46”, but only a few seconds later it is

shown to be not so much a theme as an accompaniment to a

soaring violin melody (4’53”). There’s a feeling in this moment

that something has been completed. What could be more

exquisitely natural than that this late lyrical flowering should

herald the end of the movement?


79





From the subversive wit and democratisation of texture in

Haydn’s Op. 33 and Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets it is only a

short step to Mozart’s comic masterpiece Le nozze di Figaro

, begun in October 1785 – the month after that

dedicatory letter to Haydn – and completed the following

year. Mozart’s choice of subject was extremely daring. He and

his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte adapted the play by French

dramatist Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais La Folle

journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro – then only a year old and

banned by the Viennese censors. It wasn’t so much the play’s

licentiousness that caused this as its political content. Mozart

and da Ponte had to remove several of Figaro’s more

subversive remarks before the Emperor could be persuaded torelax the ban, but there wasn’t much they could do about the

story. For a start the hero and heroine of the opera are a valet

and a lady’s maid, who thwart the erotic schemes of their

employer, the Count, and who ultimately force him to beg

forgiveness from the Countess. Figaro has been described as

‘opera’s first yuppie hero’ – and upwardly mobile he certainly

is. But the shock for an upper-class audience in eighteenth-

century Vienna would have been in seeing the lower orders


X. Democracy Moves Centre Stage

80





presented as people to be identified with, rather than as

figures of ridicule, and in seeing them beat an aristocrat at hisown games. Imagine how uncomfortable some of those rich

and respectable persons in the 1786 Burgtheater audience

must have felt as they listened to the Cavatina from Act I of

Figaro . To a delicious accompaniment of horns and pizzicato

strings – a kind of marionette’s minuet – Figaro reveals his

master plan. The implications were appalling: could their own

servants be harbouring similar secret thoughts?

Se vuol ballare, If you feel like dancing,

Signor Contino My dear Count,

Il chitarrino It is I

Le suonerò. Who will call the tune.

Se vuol venire If you’ll come

Nella mia scuola, To my school,

La capriola I’ll teach youLe insegnerò. How to caper.

And then, in a faster tempo (1’02”), we hear Figaro’s delight as

he contemplates his impending triumph:

L’arte schermendo, Acting by stealth,

L’arte adoprando, Or openly,

Di qua pungendo, Here stinging,Di là scherzando, There mocking,

Tutte le macchinè All your plots

Rovescierò. I’ll overturn.

On the face of it, Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s next operatic

collaboration, Don Giovanni (1787) , was less

politically explosive. Although it, too, tells of the punishment

of a dissolute nobleman, Don Giovanni remains heroically

defiant when confronted with his supernatural nemesis, even


81

Democracy Moves Centre Stage




when faced with the prospect of Hellfire and choruses of

salivating demons. But in the midst of the final scene of Act Icomes a passage that Mozart must have realised would cause

a frisson in late-eighteenth-century courtly circles. The setting

is Don Giovanni’s house, lit up and decorated for a festive ball

(track 27). Donna Anna, her betrothed, Don Ottavio and

Donna Elvira (one of Don Giovanni’s discarded conquests)

enter in disguise, and bent on revenge. Don Giovanni then

joins them in a toast to Liberty. This might have passed

unnoticed if Mozart hadn’t underlined the phrase ‘Viva la

libertà’ (‘Long live Liberty’) with rousing martial trumpets and

drums, and repeated it so impressively. The result would not

be out of place in Beethoven’s overtly political opera Fidelio

(1805, revised in 1806 and 1814). Even the dance music that

follows contains an element of social comment: Anna and

Ottavio (minuet) are both nobles, Zerlina (contredanse) is

peasantry, though her dancing with Giovanni makes this

middle class, while Leporello and Masetto (rustic dance) are

both of a lower order. But as the three bands end up playing

all three dances at the same time, the ‘social distinctions’ are

blurred. Zerlina’s calls for help result in a general unmasking,

then the avengers unite in the chorus ‘Trema, trema, oscellerato!’ (‘Tremble, vile seducer!’). That calls for justice

against a wicked aristocrat should follow a hymn to Liberty

and a musical representation of the breakdown of class

distinction might not be as clear a message as Figaro’s

‘Se vuol ballare’, but once you know it’s there the import

is unmistakable.

Another feature of this Act I finale shows how far the fluid

dramatic style of opera pioneered by Gluck had developed

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Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718–1795), a German

composer and theorist, offers a timely reminder that

inspiration is all well and good, but that in vocal music it

is the words that matter most:

In pieces for singing let us seek first to study and determine

exactly which affection resides in the words; how high thedegree of affection; from what sort of feelings it is

composed... Then let us be concerned to inspect closely

the essence of this affection and what sort of motions the

soul may be exposed to; how the body may even suffer

from it; what sort of motions may be caused in the body...

Only then, after having considered, tested, measured and

settled all this exactly, thoroughly and carefully, then may

we entrust ourselves to our genius, our power of

imagination and invention.

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Democracy Moves Centre Stage




Even if Mozart’s supposedly comic operas come close at times

to the political rhetoric and volcanic emotional directness of

Fidelio , there is still something – pace E.T.A. Hoffmann –

which renders Mozart distinct from the full-blooded

revolutionary Romanticism of Beethoven’s middle period, and

still more from Wagner. For one thing, the Romantic stress on

artistic originality was still largely undeveloped in Mozart’s

day. It was in the early nineteenth century that critics began to

place a premium on the distinctiveness of an artist’s work –

the element that was him and him alone. Without that, he

could not truly be accounted a ‘genius’ (a term that seems to

have been understood in a rather different sense by Mozart

and his older contemporaries). Listening to the music on theaccompanying website, it is striking how often the works of

these different composers resemble each other in manner or

detail. To a certain extent there even seems to be a common

style, within which a composer may achieve original things

without feeling the need to strive for a personal ‘voice’. J.C.

Bach’s Overture to Lucio Silla not only contained elements

that sound like Mozart, at times it could easily have been the

work of the younger Mozart. For many of the nineteenth

XI. The First Romantics?

86





century’s young generation of Romantics this absence of an

immediately identifiable personal style was a fatal problem.For Robert Schumann, for example, even Haydn had lost the

very power to surprise that had once made him so

sensationally successful:

Today it is impossible to learn anything new from him. He is

like a familiar friend of the house whom all greet with

pleasure and with esteem but who has ceased to arouse any

particular interest.

It is salutary to think that Schumann is here describing a

composer who only a generation earlier had sent London

audiences into ecstasies, and had drawn praise from the press

for his ‘astonishing, inexhaustible and sublime’ genius.

It wasn’t only stylistic traits that were common property in

the late eighteenth century: specific themes were used and

reused, often in very different contexts. One of these was the

so-called ‘Mannheim Skyrocket’ mentioned earlier. This was a

theme that shot upwards on the notes of the common chord,

often with a little tail figure that fell backwards, like the sparks

from an exploding firework. One of the most famous

examples of this is at the opening of the finale in Mozart’sSymphony No. 40 in G minor . The idea has such a

distinctive shape that Mozart’s later treatment of it is easy to

follow, especially in the passage at the beginning of the

central development section (2’03”), where the skyrocket

seems to break up into jerky fragments, pulling the music into

strange new harmonic territory. After this the skyrocket leads

us through an extraordinary sequence of remote keys – like a

flight over ever wilder territory – until the twist back to the


87

The First Romantics?




home key of G minor, and (at 3’21”) the beginning of the

recapitulation.We turn now to Beethoven, and to the first movement of his

Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2 No. 1 . He began it in

1793, just five years after Mozart wrote his Fortieth Symphony.

By then Mozart was dead, carried off by a mystery illness at the

age of just thirty-five, and there may well have been an element

of memorial tribute in Beethoven’s choice of the same

skyrocket theme as appeared in the older man’s still-recent G

minor Symphony. Whatever the motivation, the young

Beethoven was clearly intent on making an impression in this,

his first piano sonata, and it is conceived on an ambitious scale:

four movements, instead of the three or two favoured by his

teacher Haydn, and all of them filled with weighty, serious

emotional content. The only difference in the theme itself is that

Beethoven slightly extends the falling tail-figure at the end, with

a little turn. But almost immediately the theme begins to

fragment, splitting into ever-smaller pieces and finally coming

to a pause on a much expanded version of the final turn

(0’07”). The dramatic ‘break-up’ effect that Mozart reserved for

a key moment at the heart of his finale is used here by

Beethoven at the very beginning. Mozart glances atRomanticism in passing; Beethoven makes it his starting point.


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XII. Prometheus Unbound

It is no surprise to find the young Beethoven being especially

daring in a work for the piano. This was his own instrument,

one on which he had already built up a reputation as a

performer with a highly novel kind of mastery. Beethoven’s

approach to playing the piano was aptly summed up by his

younger friend, the composer and pianist Carl Czerny

(1791–1857). Czerny contrasted Beethoven’s style at the

keyboard with that of Mozart:

Mozart’s school: clear and markedly brilliant playing based

more on staccato [detached] than legato [smooth]; a witty

and lively execution. The pedal is rarely used and never

necessary.

Beethoven’s manner: characteristic and passionate strength,

alternating with all the charms of a smooth cantabile [singing], is its outstanding feature…

Beethoven, who appeared around 1790, drew entirely new

and daring passages from the Fortepiano by the use of the

pedal, by an exceptionally characteristic way of playing,

particularly distinguished by a strict legato of the chords, and

thus created a new type of singing tone and many hitherto

unimagined effects. His playing did not possess that clean

and brilliant elegance of certain other pianists. On the other

hand, it was spirited, grandiose and, especially in adagio ,

89

Prometheus Unbound




Carl Czerny (1791–1857)

90





very full of feeling and Romantic. His performance, like his

compositions, was a tone-painting of a very high order andconceived only for a total effect.

Some of those who took an early interest in Beethoven saw

him as a potential heir to the legacy of Mozart and Haydn, not

a rebel in the making. When Beethoven set off from his native

Bonn to Vienna in 1792, with a view to studying with Haydn

(his hopes of studying with Mozart had been dashed by the

latter’s death in 1791), his patron, Count Ferdinand von

Waldstein, wrote these words in his private album:

Dear Beethoven,

You are now going to Vienna in fulfilment of a wish that has

for so long been thwarted. The genius of Mozart still mourns

and weeps for the death of its protégé. It has found a refuge in

the inexhaustible Haydn, but no permanent abode. Through

him it desires once more to find a union with someone.

Through your unceasing diligence, receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.

It may well be that Beethoven saw it that way too. But it was a

while before he was able to realise the full implications of

what he had evoked in passages like the opening of theSonata, Op. 2 No. 1. This is not to be taken as a criticism of

Beethoven’s earlier work en masse; and yet one of the most

exciting characteristics of early – and, according to some,

Classical – Beethoven is the feeling that at any moment this

new Romantic spirit might be unleashed – that Napoleon’s

troops might come storming into the Viennese rococo drawing

room. And the closer one gets to Beethoven’s Napoleonic

masterpiece, his Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’ (1803–04), the

91

Prometheus Unbound





92

more the element of surprise, so exquisitely cultivated by

Haydn, takes on a heroic, revolutionary aspect. The spirit of this new revolutionary Romanticism is superbly captured by

the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his lyrical drama

Prometheus Unbound (1818–19). Prometheus was the

legendary Titan who stole fire from the gods to give to

mankind, and was hideously punished for his rebellion. He

became a potent symbol for the early revolutionaries, and it is

no coincidence that the finale of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’

Symphony is based on music written for a ballet about

Prometheus. One can imagine Beethoven enthusiastically

endorsing Shelley’s hymn to the ‘Unbound’ Titan at the end of

his poem:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death of night;To defy Power that seems omnipotent;

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

The urge to embrace this new spirit can be heard in the finale

of Beethoven’s Second Symphony in D major, Op. 36

(1801–2) . At times it’s as though the transformation

from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century were happening

in front of our ears. At first glance, Beethoven’s Second

appears to be a symphony that behaves in a reasonably

Classical manner. It is scored for an orchestra no larger than

that used by Haydn in several of his ‘London’ symphonies,





than the fate of the revolutionary movement in France.

In June 1800, at the age of thirty, he spelt it out for the firsttime in a letter to a close friend, the violinist and theology

student Karl Amenda:

Your Beethoven is living most unhappily at odds with

Nature and his Creator; several times already I have cursed

the latter for exposing His Creatures to the most trifling

afflictions, whereby the finest flowers are often destroyed

and broken. You must know that the noblest part of me,

my hearing, has greatly declined; while you were still with

me I already had some inkling of this, but said nothing;

and now it has grown steadily worse. Whether it is curable

remains to be seen; they say it is caused by the condition

of my bowels. In that respect I am almost completely

cured. As to whether my hearing will now improve as

well, I indeed hope so, but faintly: such diseases are the

most persistent. How sad my life will be henceforth,deprived of all I love and value, and withal surrounded by

such miserable, selfish people…

How happy I should now be, if only my hearing were

unimpaired. Melancholy resignation, in which I must now

take refuge; I have indeed resolved to disregard all this,

but how shall I be able to do so? I beg you to keep this matter of my hearing a great secret and not to confide it to anyone whatsoever .

The following year, at about the time he was completing the

Second Symphony, Beethoven penned the so-called

‘Heiligenstadt Testament’. An enigmatic document, apparently

addressed to his brothers Carl and Johann but, it seems, never

sent, it wavers in tone between a last will and testament, a

suicide note and a private confession. At one point Beethoven

appears to be struggling to come to terms with a grim realisation:

94





“To us musicians the work of Beethoven parallels

the pillars of smoke and fire which led the

Israelites through the desert.”

Franz Liszt, letter to Wilhelm von Lenz (1852)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

95

Prometheus Unbound




Just think, for the last six years I have been afflicted with an

incurable complaint which has been made worse byincompetent doctors. From year to year my hopes of being

cured have gradually been shattered and finally I have been

forced to accept the prospect of a permanent infirmity (the

curing of which may take years and may even prove to be

impossible). Though endowed with a passionate and lively

temperament and even fond of the distractions offered by

society I was soon obliged to seclude myself and live in

solitude. If at times I decided just to ignore my infirmity,

alas! how cruelly was I then driven back by the intensified

sad experience of my poor hearing. Yet I could not bring

myself to say to people: ‘Speak up, shout, for I am deaf’.

Alas! how could I possibly refer to the impairing of a sense which in me should be more perfectly developed than in

other people, a sense which at one time I possessed in the

greatest perfection, even to a degree of perfection such as

assuredly few in my profession possess or have ever

possessed.

The tone of bitter reproach – at human society, at God, at

himself – continues. But then another illustration of the

alienating horror of deafness leads to a highly significant

remark.

My sensible doctor by suggesting that I should spare myhearing as much as possible has more or less encouraged

my present natural inclination, though indeed when carried

away now and then more by my instinctive desire for

human society, I have let myself be tempted to seek it. But

how humiliated I have felt if somebody standing beside me

heard the sound of a flute in the distance and I heard nothing , or if somebody heard a shepherd sing and again I

heard nothing. Such experiences almost made me despair,and I was on the point of putting an end to my life – the

only thing that held me back was my art .

96





Prometheus Unbound

99

wrote over one of his sketches, ‘Let your deafness no longer

be a secret, in Art as in life’ – the history of music can trulybe said to have entered a new era.




Sources of Featured Panels

Page 16: Dalhaus, Carl, Esthetics of Music , Cambridge UniversityPress, 1982


Page 29: Strunk, Oliver, Source Readings in Music History for the Classic Era, Faber & Faber, 1981



Pages 58–9: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract , PenguinClassics, 1968

Page 70: Robbins Landon, H.C., The Great Composers: Haydn,Faber & Faber, 1981




100





101




104


Music History

1757

1758

1759

1760

1761

1762

1763

1764

1765

1766

1767

Scarlatti dies; Johann Stamitz dies

Handel dies

Cherubini born

Haydn begins thirty-year period of

employment with Esterházy family

Gluck Orfeo ed Euridice ; J.C. Bach

appointed composer to King’s

Theatre, London

Mozart begins travels as child

virtuoso, staying in Paris and London

Rameau dies; J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel

found a series of subscription

concerts in London

Telemann dies; Gluck Alceste

Seven Years War ends

James Hargreaves invents Spinning

Jenny

reign of Habsburg Emperor Joseph II

begins in Austria




105

Timeline

Art and Architecture Literature

Blake born

Burns born; Voltaire Candide ; Johnson

Rasselas

Sterne Tristram Shandy (first part)

Cobbett born;

Rousseau The Social Contract

Panthéon in Paris begun (Germain Soufflot)

Boucher Madame de Pompadour

Hogarth dies

Fragonard The Swing

Gainsborough Johann Christian Bach




106


Music History

1768

1769

1770

1771

1772

1773

1774

1775

1776

1777

C.P.E. Bach succeeds Telemann asdirector of music for the five principal

churches in Hamburg

Mozart La finta semplice

Beethoven born; Vanhal Six

Symphonies, Op. 7

Carl Stamitz Six Symphonies, Op. 6

Haydn Symphony No. 45 (‘Farewell’),

String Quartets, Op. 20;

Mozart Lucio Silla

C.P.E. Bach Six Symphonies

Mozart Violin Concertos, K. 216, 218

& 219

Mozart travels to Mannheim and Paris

Napoleon Bonaparte born; James

Watt’s steam engine patented

accession of Louis XVI to French

throne

Declaration of American

Independence




107

Timeline


Sterne dies

Wordsworth born; Oliver Goldsmith

The Deserted Village

Scott born; Charles Burney The Present State of Music in France and Italy

Choderlos de Laclos Les Liaisons dangéreuses

Coleridge born

Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther

Jane Austen born; Beaumarchais

Le Barbier de Séville ; Johnson A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

E.T.A. Hoffmann born; Hume dies;

Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 1); Smith The Wealth of Nations

Sheridan The School for Scandal

Canaletto dies; Royal Academy, Londonfounded

Tiepolo dies; Boucher dies;

Gainsborough The Blue Boy

Caspar David Friedrich born

Turner born; Fragonard The Fête atSaint-Cloud

Constable born




108


Music History

Hummel born

Mozart Sinfonia concertante , K. 364

Vanhal Three Symphonies, Op. 10

Mozart Idomeneo

Paganini born; J.C. Bach dies; Haydn

String Quartets, Op. 33; Paisiello Il barbiere di Siviglia

Mozart Piano Concertos, K. 449, 450,

451 & 456

Mozart Piano Concertos, K. 466 &

467, dedicates set of six string

quartets to Haydn

Mozart Le nozze di Figaro , Piano

Concertos, K. 488 & 491, Symphony,

K. 504 (‘Prague’)

Mozart Don Giovanni

C.P.E. Bach dies; Mozart Symphonies,

K. 543, 550 & 551 (‘Jupiter’)

Russia annexes Crimea

Edmund Cartwright’s power loom

mechanises cotton industry

1778

1779

1780

1781

1782

1783

1784

1785

1786

1787

1788




109

Timeline


Rousseau dies; Voltaire dies; FannyBurney Evelina

Schiller The Robbers ;Kant Critique of Pure Reason

Stendhal born

Johnson dies; Beaumarchais Le Mariage de Figaro

Boswell Tour of the Hebrides

Burns Poems Chiefly in the ScottishDialect

Schiller Don Carlos

Byron born; Goethe Egmont

Piranesi dies

Fuseli The Nightmare Leipzig Gewandhaus built

David Oath of the Horatii

Gainsborough dies; Soane begins to

rebuild and extend the Bank of England




110


Music History

Mozart Così fan tutte

Mozart Die Zauberflöte ; Mozart dies;

Haydn’s first visit to England

Rossini born; Haydn Symphony

No. 94 (‘The Surprise’)

Haydn completes 12 ‘London’

Symphonies; Beethoven Piano Trios,

Op. 1

Haydn Missa in tempore belli

Schubert born; Donizetti born

Haydn The Creation, ‘Nelson Mass’

French Revolution begins; GeorgeWashington first US President

French republic declared; France at

war with Austria and Prussia

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette

executed in Paris; France at war with

Britain, Spain and Netherlands

France abolishes slavery in its colonies

Napoleon leads French army,

invades Italy

Venice surrenders to French

French capture Rome; English fleet

under Nelson defeat French at battleof Nile

1789

1790

1791

1792

1793

1794

1795

1796

1797

1798




112


Music History

Beethoven Symphony No. 1

Bellini born

Berlioz born; Beethoven Symphony

No. 3 (‘Eroica’)

Boccherini dies; Beethoven Fidelio

Beethoven String Quartets, Op. 59

(‘Rasumovsky’)

Beethoven Symphonies Nos 5 & 6

(‘Pastoral’)

Mendelssohn born; Haydn dies;Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5

(‘Emperor’)

French driven from Italy by alliance of Britain, Austria, Russia, Naples,

Turkey; Napoleon appointed First

Consul in France

France sells Louisiana to USA; John

Dalton proposes atomic theory

Napoleon crowned Emperor in France

Nelson dies at The Battle of Trafalgar

slavery outlawed by British Parliament

Napoleon’s troops occupy Spain

British forces under Wellesley (laterWellington) sent to defend Portugal

1799

1800

1801

1802

1803

1804

1805

1806

1807

1808

1809




113

Timeline


Hölderlin Hyperion

Dumas born; Victor Hugo born;

Madame de Staël Delphine

Schiller William Tell

Schiller dies; Wordsworth The Prelude

Goethe Faust Part 1;

Scott Marmion

Goya Los Caprichos

Goya The Family of Charles IV ;sculptures taken from the Parthenon

and brought to London by Lord Elgin

Fragonard dies

David The Coronation of Napoleon

Caspar David Friedrich The Cross in the Mountains




114


Music History

Chopin born; Schumann born;Paganini makes first tour of Europe

Liszt born

Wagner born; Verdi born

Rossini Il barbiere di Siviglia

Wellington finally drives French from

Spain; Napoleon’s disastrous retreat

from Moscow

Austria and Prussia declare war on

France; Mexico declares

independence from Spain

allied forces enter Paris; Napoleon

abdicates

Napoleon returns from exile, defeated

at Waterloo

1810

1811

1812

1813

1814

1815

1816




115

Timeline


Austen Sense and Sensibility

Byron Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (firstpart)

Austen Pride and Prejudice




Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809)(b. Klosterneuburg, Austria; d. Vienna, Austria)

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788)(b. Weimar, Germany; d. Hamburg, Germany)

Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782)(b. Leipzig, Germany; d. London, England)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)(b. Bonn, Germany; d. Vienna, Austria)

Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805)(b. Lucca, Italy; d. Madrid, Spain)

Carl Czerny (1791–1857)(b. Vienna, Austria; d. Vienna, Austria)

Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–1799)

(b. Vienna, Austria; d. Neuhof, Czech Republic)

Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–1787)(b. Erabach, Germany; d. Vienna, Austria)

François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829)(b. Vergnies, Belgium; d. Passy, France)

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)(b. Rohrau, Austria; d. Vienna, Austria)

Roman Hoffstetter (1742–1815)(b. Laudenbach, Germany; d. Miltenberg, Germany)

Composers of the Classical Era

116





Leopold Mozart (1719–1787)(b. Augsburg, Germany; d. Salzburg, Austria)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)(b. Salzburg, Austria; d. Vienna, Austria)

Carl Stamitz (1745–1801)(b. Mannheim, Germany; d. Jena, Germany)

Johann Stamitz (1717–1757)(b. Nemecky Brod, Czech Republic; d. Mannheim, Germany)

117

Composers of the Classical Era




Map showing birthplaces of Classical Era composers

118





Please note: definitions are mostly given in the sense they had

or acquired during the Classical Era.

Allegro lively, quick, fast

Assai very

Aria a substantial piece for solo voice with orchestra orsolo instrument(s), most commonly found in operas,oratorios and cantatas

Cantata literally ‘sung’. In the eighteenth century cantatas werenormally works for soloist(s), chorus and orchestra,shorter than either operas or oratorios, on sacred orsecular subjects.

Con grazia gracefully

Crescendo literally ‘growing’; not (as it is often understood today)a climax, but the process of building towards aclimax; a gradual loudening

Clavichord a small keyboard instrument, especially popular in the

Baroque and early Classical periods, in which thestrings are pressed and released. As the soundproduced was very quiet, it was suitable only forprivate performance.

Concerto literally a ‘concerted performance’. The Classicalconcerto is normally a work in several movements(most commonly three) for virtuoso soloist andorchestra.

Counterpoint a style of writing in which each part or ‘voice’ isindependent and has significance in itself, as well as

in the context of the whole texture. The supremecontrapuntal form is the Fugue.

Glossary

119

Glossary




Divertimento amusement, diversion; a piece for ensemble or soloinstrument of light character, often intended for open-

air performance

Dolcissimo very sweetly

Fantasia a work for solo instrument or ensemble, in whichfamiliar forms are either abandoned or treated withstriking freedom

Forte strong, loud

Fortissimo very strong/loud

Glockenspiel literally, ‘bell-play’. A set of small metal bars, oftenarranged like the keys on a piano, and struck withhand-held hammers. It emits a high-pitched, tinklingsound.

Legato bound together, smoothly

Melodrama dramatic composition or section of opera or play inwhich words are spoken to a varying musicalaccompaniment

Minuet a dance with three beats to the bar, usually in A–B–Aform, with the central B section often called ‘trio’.Minuets appear in many Classical symphonies,normally as the third movement, or as the second orthird movement of a chamber work.

Opera seria literally ‘serious opera’. Mainly based on mythologicalsubjects, by the eighteenth century the form hadbecome highly formalised, with much use of the so-called ‘da capo aria’ – a kind of aria with asymmetrical A–B–A pattern.

Oratorio a work on a religious subject for soloist(s), chorus and

orchestra

Overture an orchestral piece preceding an opera or oratorio.In the eighteenth century the term was sometimesinterchangeable with ‘symphony’.

Piano soft, quiet

Pianissimo very soft/quiet

Pizzicato playing a stringed instrument by plucking the stringswith the fingers

Presto quick, normally faster than ‘allegro’

120





Recapitulation The section of an extended work or movement inwhich earlier themes are heard again in full

Recitative speech-like, rhythmically free singing, usedespecially in opera and oratorio. In opera seria,recitative was clearly separated from arias, whichwere often dramatically static and reflective. But inthe operas of Gluck and Mozart the boundariesbegin to blur, with heightened dramatic effect.

Scherzo literally ‘joke’. Generally the liveliest movement in asymphony or chamber work, with three beats to the

bar, the scherzo begins to replace the more statelyminuet in Haydn’s string quartets, and moredramatically in the symphonies and quartets of Beethoven.

Serenade/serenata literally ‘evening music’, e.g. the kind of song a manmight sing beneath his beloved’s window. By Mozart’stime it also came to mean a kind of ‘divertimento’written for an evening’s entertainment.

Soave suave, gentle

Sonata instrumental composition, usually in more than onemovement, for keyboard or another solo instrumentwith keyboard

Staccato notes played in a short, detached style

Symphony originally interchangeable with ‘overture’, by the lateeighteenth century ‘symphony’ had come to mean arelatively serious concert work for orchestra in severalmovements, typically four, including a minuet orscherzo and a slow(er) more lyrical movement

Tattoo military music for trumpets or bugles with drums, or amilitary display featuring mock battles

Tremolo literally ‘shaking’, ‘trembling’; rapid reiteration of anote or chord, especially on stringed instruments,where the bow is drawn forwards and backwardsacross the string as quickly as possible

121

Glossary




Stephen Johnson studied at the Northern School of Music,

Manchester, at Leeds University under Alexander Goehr then

at Manchester University. Since then he has written regularly

for The Independent and The Guardian, and was Chief Music

Critic of The Scotsman (1998–9). He has also broadcast

frequently for BBC Radios 3 and 4,and for the BBC World

Service, including a series of fourteen programmes about themusic of Bruckner for the centenary of the composer’s death

(1996). He is the author of Bruckner Remembered (Faber,

1998), Mahler: His Life and Music and Wagner: His Life and

Music (Naxos Books, 2006 and 2007), a contributor to The

Cambridge Companion to Conducting (CUP, 2004), and a

regular presenter for Radio 3’s Discovering Music . In 2003

Stephen was voted Amazon.com Classical Music Writer of

the Year.

About the Author

122





Index

123

AAddison, Joseph 13

Alberti, Leon Battista 10, 17, 24,

40

Albrechtsberger, Johann Georg 36

Prelude and Fugue in C

major 37

Amenda, Karl 94

Arco, Count 42arias 119, 121

Gluck 53–4, 83

Haydn 14

Mozart 63–4, 83

Austen, Jane Sense and Sensibility 21, 115

BBach, Carl Philipp Emanuel21–4, 26, 49, 106, 108

clavichord 21, 28

‘Hamburg’ symphonies 23,

24

symphonies 23–4, 26, 106

Bach, Johann Christian 48–9,

104, 108

Lucio Silla 49, 86Bach, Johann Sebastian 21, 37,

102

Bardi, Giovanni de’ 23

Baroque era 23, 35, 37, 44

concerto 28, 40

Gossec 66

opera 49, 53

Quantz 43

trombone 38

Beaumarchais, Pierre-AugustinCaron de Le Mariage de Figaro 80, 109

Beethoven, Carl (brother to

Ludwig) 94

Beethoven, Johann (brother to

Ludwig) 94

Beethoven, Ludwig van 8, 12,

30–2, 94–9, 106

Cantata on the Death of the Emperor Joseph II 44

deafness 94, 96, 98–9

Fidelio 82, 84, 86, 112

Haydn 88, 91–2, 98

‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ 94,

98

Mozart 31, 91, 98

piano 30–2, 88, 89, 91, 110,112

Piano Concerto No. 3 31–2

Index




Kelly, Michael 11

Reminiscences 51Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian

Sturm und Drang 17

LLenz, Wilhelm von 95

Liszt, Franz 95, 116

Louis XVI, King of France 44,

106, 110

MMahler, Gustav 35

Symphony No. 1 26

Mannheim Court Orchestra 33,

35, 42, 84, 102, 106

crescendo 35, 37, 93

sigh 35

skyrocket 35, 87–8Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm 85

Mattheson, Johann 16

Mercure de France 54

Milton, John 63

Morning Chronicle, The 70

Mozart, Leopold (father of

Wolfgang) 29, 30, 42, 49, 78,

83–4

Trombone Concerto in Gmajor 38

Mozart, Maria Anna ‘Nannerl’

(sister to Wolfgang) 78

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 8,

10–12, 86–8, 102, 104, 121

Beethoven 31, 91, 98

clemenza di Tito, La 47

Colloredo 42, 45Così fan tutte 47, 62, 110

death 60–1, 88, 110

Don Giovanni 38, 47, 62,

81–4, 98, 108Eine Kleine Freimaurer- Kantate 62

Fantasia in F minor 37

Freemasonry 57, 59–63

Haydn 15, 60–1, 77–9, 80,

91, 98, 108

‘Haydn’ quartets 78–9, 80

Idomeneo 38, 108

Mannheim Court Orchestra33, 106

nozze di Figaro, Le 47, 62,

80–2, 108

operas 38, 47, 49, 62–4,

80–4, 86, 98, 108, 110,

120–1

piano 30–1, 89, 108

piano concertos 31Piano Concerto in C minor

31–2

Serenata notturna 42, 44

Sinfonia concertante 108

string quartets 77–9, 80, 108

String Quartet, K. 428 in

E flat major 79

Symphony No. 40, K. 550

10, 87–8, 108Zauberflöte, Die 62–4, 110

NNapoleon Bonaparte 44, 45, 91,

106, 110, 112, 114

Nelson, Admiral Lord Horatio

45, 110, 112

Newton, Sir Isaac 13Niemetschek, Franz Xaver 10

126





O

oboe 33, 73opera seria 47, 49, 53, 84,

120–1

operas 23, 43, 47–55, 119–21

Bach, J.C. 49, 86

Beethoven 82, 84, 86, 112

Gluck 50, 51, 53–5, 82, 104,

121

Handel 51

Mozart 38, 47, 49, 62–4,80–4, 86, 98, 108, 110,

120–1

oratorios 119–20

Creation, The 31, 110

organ 28, 37

P

Peacock, Thomas Love Headlong Hall 72–3

Perfect Kapellmeister, The 16

Peri, Jacopo 23

piano (fortepiano) 28, 30–2, 37,

120

Beethoven 30–2, 88, 89, 91,

110, 112

Mozart 30–1, 89, 108

pizzicato 14, 81, 120Ployer, Barbara von 30

Pompeii 13

Ponte, Lorenzo da 80–1

Puchberg, Michael 57, 59–61

QQuantz, J.J. 43

RRacine, Jean 20

Rasoumowsky, Prince von 76

recitative 51, 121Mozart 62, 83–4, 121

Reichardt, J.F. 24, 76

Riesbeck, Johann Caspar Travel through Germany 61

Robespierre, Maximilien 56

Romanticism 10, 12, 17, 45, 51,

86–8

Bach, C.P.E. 26

Beethoven 31–2, 86, 88, 91,98

Haydn 17, 20

Mozart 12, 31, 84, 86–8

Shelley 92

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 17–18,

20, 56–7, 62, 109

Emile, ou Traité d’Éducation

18Social Contract, The 56, 58,

105

SSaint-Just, Louis de 56

Salomon, Johann Peter 68, 70–1

Schikaneder, Emanuel 63–4

Schumann, Robert 10, 12, 87, 114

Schuppanzigh, Herr 76Schwetzingen Grotto 35, 72

Shakespeare, William 18

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Prometheus Unbound 92

Shostakovich, Dmitry Symphony

No. 10 26

silences 20, 30, 75, 79

Smith, Adam The Wealth of Nations 44

sonatas 23, 30, 88, 91, 121

127

Index




Stamitz, Carl 33

Clarinet Concerto No. 1 32Stamitz, Johann 33–5, 93, 104

Symphony in D major 35

string quartets 14, 73–8, 79

Beethoven 74, 112, 121

Haydn 14, 20, 73–9, 80,

106, 108, 121

Mozart 77–9, 80, 108

Sturm und Drang 17, 20, 21,

26–7, 28, 98Swieten, Baron von 24

symphonies 26, 40, 120–1

Bach, C.P.E. 23–4, 26, 106

Beethoven 38, 73, 91–4, 98,

112, 121

Haydn 17, 20, 24, 26, 71–3,

92–3, 98, 106, 110

Mannheim Court Orchestra33, 35

Mozart 10, 87–8, 108

Stamitz, Johann 35

T

Waldstein, Count Ferdinand von

91word-painting 97

ZZelter, Karl Friedrich 97



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